Just cause” protection is helpful because one of the main reasons private sector workers shy away from organizing is their fear of being fired.
Readers Comments on: Wealth Equality; Robert Reich on raising the minimum wage; Unions and evictions; Wither the Socialist Left? - another response to Mark Solomon; LA School Board election and Big Money; Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget; Guns, the NRA and Newtown; Why not better unions; Philip Bonosky Memorial April 21 in New York; Francisco Aruca R.I.P.; Robin Hood rides again - April 20 - Washington; The Literary Left - Tribute in honor of Alan Wald - March 21 - Ann Arbor
Thomas Perez, reported to be President Barack Obama's choice to lead the Dept. of Labor, stands to be a target of conservatives because of his unapologetic civil rights advocacy.
In recent months, regulators have demanded millions of dollars from companies that hired independent contractors to hang drywall, install cable, staff call centers, give manicures and perform other jobs in which the government said workers were really functioning as company employees.
The AFL-CIO held a closed-door executive council meeting last week. The mood at the meeting, one AFL-CIO top staffer said, was that the future of the labor movement was at risk if they continued "business as usual."
Recent events have begun to cause labor activists to seriously consider if a hamstrung NLRB, and emboldened employers, could potentially inspire some unions to push the limits of labor law to try alternative means that are outside the law or if they can and should borrow the strategies used by the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to expand civil rights.
Growing income inequality—approaching now obscene levels—is not simply a ‘moral outrage’. It not only represents a gross violation of historically held American values or reasonable equality for all. It is a condition that has served, and continues to serve, as a major cause of the lack of sustained economic recovery in the US now for five years—as well as a major factor in explaining why the US continues today to drift toward another ‘double dip’ recession.
Membership has plummeted and once-powerful groups have lost clout as conservative governments oppose worker activism.
Foxconn has announced that workers will be able to vote for union representatives at their factories. The plan, according to news reports, is to allow workers to elect “junior workers” to represent them in a union leadership structure historically dominated by management and officials.
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